Short-term phonological memory in preschool children

PURPOSE: The purpose of this study was to design a short-term memory test, to describe quantitative performance in typically language developing children and to verify the relationship between the non-words repetition and oral phonological measure. METHODS: The participants included 136 typically language developing children aged from 3 years to 6 years and 11 months old in this study, who were evaluated. The test consisted of 40 non-words of one, two, three, and four syllables. The subjects' repetitions were transcribed and the number of right answers was calculated for each age range. RESULTS: The effect of age was observed in the test, as well as the effect of length, only for disyllabic non-words. The performance in the non-word repetition task showed correlation with the oral phonology measure. CONCLUSION: The test designed in this research was able to verify the short-term memory in typically language developing children and the results showed correlation between this memory and phonological performance